No Guts No Glory
by writerofthelord
Summary: Daryl and Beth are real tired of all this running, especially when they're not even sure if it's worth it.


And they were running.

That's all they knew how to do anymore. How to shove their feet into the ground, and how to pick up their fallen breaths. How to keep going, even through the grass that was bright with spilled blood. How to leap over scattered limbs instead of trip over them.

Running was fighting. It was surviving.

If they could run through a living graveyard, they could go anywhere in the world.

Beth hated to look down at all those guts. If she looked at them any longer, she might just lose her own. She might find them pouring out of her throat because she couldn't stand to be alive when no one else was.

Just her and Daryl. Moving and hardly able to breathe.

"We're not really alive," she said. "We're just dying. It's taking a long time but we're dying."

He said, "I know," and they kept going.

Daryl was always going.

She didn't know how he did it. Him who had tried to save a little girl, only to see her come at her mother with a look of hunger in her eyes. Him who had saved a dear friend, only for her to kill two others in an act of desperation. Him who had named a baby Little Asskicker but saw himself as a coward.

Beth always watched him. Always made sure he wasn't going to collapse under the weight of it all. And she kept herself alive for him. She still thought back to those razors sometimes. She thought of the blood on her wrists. But then she thought of the way he'd try to clean up the blood, the way he'd look at her, and then she couldn't do it. She couldn't hurt Daryl.

Sometimes, anyways, she figured they might have a chance.

Part of it was her dad.

Beth wasn't stupid. She knew that her father might have been too optimistic, too hopeful for his own good. But she also knew that even with a missing leg, he had kept going. And if he could do that, then she could definitely run.

She missed him with all her heart, and this was why she worked so hard to protect it.

That was the thing that struck her most about the walkers. Human killers, oh, they were bad. She didn't know how anyone with a beating heart could make someone else's heart stop. But at least the heart was still in the victim's chest. At least the kidneys were still in place. The lungs. The liver.

The walkers tore it all out.

They took what had made the person alive, replacing the empty shell with a bullet. Nothing but a body walking around with a hunger to kill.

One day, Beth and Daryl were running. Aching. They were going through the woods and just like that, they were falling over a body. Legs that couldn't move fast enough tangled with legs that would never move again. Beth sat there looking down at the eyes that wouldn't open. The body's chest was open, instead, and its ribs were ripped apart and she reached for her own ribs, touching her skin all over until she was sure she was whole.

"I hate this," she said.

Daryl sat in the grass next to her. He reached over, under her arms, pulled her to him. "I know. So do I."

They sat pressed together, Beth nearly in Daryl's lap, feeling almost like a little kid again and relieved, so relieved, that someone could make her feel safe again. Thank God there was a lap for her to sit in. Thank God Daryl had those hands like her father's. Rough and hard, looking for a way to be kind. Daryl loved his bow not just because he liked to shoot it, though he really did like to shoot it. He liked having someone to care about, someone to save.

"Just. Isn't that the worst thing? They're already gone. At least give the world someone to bury. You can't even tell they were really a person if everything that made them one is gone."

Daryl nodded, his nose hitting the back of Beth's head. "It's stupid as hell. We just gotta go with it."

"I don't want to go with it. I can't. I've lost everyone, Daryl. My mom. My brothers. Dad. And now -"

"Not Maggie. You don't know about Maggie."

Beth whipped her head around, her ponytail whipping across Daryl's face. "That's the thing. I don't know. She might already be dead. What if we do find her again, except she has those horrible yellow eyes and she looks at me like she wants to eat me instead of take care of me?"

Daryl tightened his grip around her.

"I'll want to hug her, Daryl. I'll go up to hug her and she'll try and bite my face off."

She was crying, then. She didn't know how to stop it. She just sat there shaking and let Daryl hold her, quiet and still. The thing that kept her moving when they needed to escape. The thing that stopped her when they couldn't move anymore. When they just had to sit and think about what may happen.

They sat there cherishing every breath. Every shiver, every wince.

They could not hear their friends, wherever they were. They could not hear laughter or a baby's cries. For now, though, hearing each other's hearts beat was enough.

When they started running again, they knew to listen to the sound of panting beside them, rather than wait for a scream. They had something to survive for.


End file.
